Ghost Ahead

by Spike Black

  “Depart, accursed one!” the priest yelled, his arms thrown up into the air. “Depart with all your deceits!”

  The entity, having now lost all human form, rushed him, spinning him like a top, knocking him to the floor. It shot from the container, hurtling into the sky. Garth watched as the thing that now looked like a smoking jellyfish exploded into light, its remnants dissipating like wispy clouds.

  And then it was gone. Eddie Serling was no more.

  Garth helped Father Padraig to his feet, and together they stared up into the clear night sky, both men cackling with joy. Ripples of elation coursed through him as he patted the priest on the back.

  Victory tasted so very, very sweet.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 14

  He scored one strike, then another. His bowling arm trembled as the magnitude of what he had achieved began to soak in: a strike in all nine frames so far, and two in the tenth. To cap it all, Wendy and Chloe were here to witness it, cheering him on from the seats behind him, their family outing having turned into a career highlight as Garth picked his final ball from the rack.

  This was it. One more strike for the perfect game.

  He approached the lane, glanced back, and noticed that everyone in the bowling alley had stopped what they were doing to watch him.

  No pressure.

  He put it out of his mind and focused on the task at hand, locking onto his target.

  He pulled his arm back, ready to deliver the ball that would score his first three-hundred. Something felt strange around his hand. The ball seemed to be made of hair.

  He glanced down and discovered, to his horror, that what he was holding was not a bowling ball at all, but a severed human head.

  And his fingers were lodged in Juha’s eye sockets.

  The Juha ball screamed, and Garth hurled it down in disgust. He spun around and saw that all the balls in the rack were human heads, too, including Eddie and the family of four, and they all started screaming, matching the pitch of Juha’s scream.

  Garth turned to Wendy and Chloe for help, but their mouths dropped open and they began screaming, and as he looked around, the mouths of everyone in the bowling alley were wide, but the noise coming from their mouths was of a lower pitch, not a scream this time, but a moan.

  The moans of Eddie’s ghost as he was torn apart in the container.

  And soon the moans overpowered the screams until there was only the moaning, an orchestra of droning horror, and Garth clapped his hands to his ears, his mouth falling open, but the only sound that escaped his throat was the moaning…

  Garth woke with a start.

  The room was silent, save for Wendy’s steady breathing next to him. He exhaled, flashes of the nightmare popping across his vision as he lay there a few moments, allowing his racing heart to return to normal.

  He climbed out of bed and went downstairs. Poured himself a tall glass of water and downed it in a few frenzied gulps. Poured another and carried it through to the living room, to the large bay window. Parting the curtains, he peered out.

  He saw something that made him double-take.

  Bathed in the sickly glow of the streetlights was a car, parked directly opposite his house, that didn’t belong in this neighborhood. A car that he recognized immediately. It was scruffy, like its owner.

  ***

  Dressed now, Garth closed the front door gently behind him and stepped out onto the street. As he crossed the road he noticed that Keith’s arm was hanging out of the driver’s side window, his long fingers drumming on the door panel, a cigarette lodged between them. His hand extended in a brief wave.

  Garth approached the vehicle. “What are you doing here?”

  “No need for paranoia, buddy,” Keith said. “Just having a smoke. The missus doesn’t like it in the house.”

  “So you drove all the way out here for a cigarette? At this time of night?”

  “I know. The things I’ll do for my habit.” He exhaled a plume of smoke. “Why don’t you join me?”

  Garth’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Yeah you do,” Keith said, his eyes drilling into him, and suddenly Garth was convinced that Keith had some kind of detective superpowers, and that he knew all about the crafty cigarette that Garth occasionally enjoyed, four years after telling Wendy he’d given up.

  A voice in his head ordered him to get back inside the house, but instead he found himself walking around the rusty Ford, opening the dented passenger door and climbing into the seat. He took a cigarette from the pack that Keith held out to him. Accepted his offer of a light.

  The interior of the car made the outside seem well kept, with fast food cartons filling the footwell, paperwork littering the back seat and a blanket of dust coating the dashboard. The windshield was so grubby that Garth was surprised Keith could even see out of it.

  “So, what are you doing up at three in the morning?” Keith asked.

  “It’s the shift worker’s lot,” Garth said. “You can never sleep when you need to.”

  Maybe he’s not here for me at all, Garth suddenly thought. Maybe it’s Wendy. Maybe he’s pined for her all these years, held a candle for her since she left the station. And now he parks outside our house every night, staring up at the bedroom window like some lovesick teenage weirdo.

  “Tell me about it,” Keith replied, tapping his cigarette ash out of the window. “I’ve had no end of trouble since…you know, since we found him. Eddie, that is.”

  You and me both, pal.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You hear about the key we found in his pocket?”

  “The storage container?”

  “Right, right. So we unlock it, take a look inside.” He puffed on his cigarette. “It was like stepping through the gates of hell itself. Stuff you wouldn’t believe. Torsos on hooks, chunks of - ugh - who-knows-what all over the floor. They were clean and pink, his victims. Shaved of body hair. They didn’t look like people - they looked like meat.”

  Garth flashed back to the moment he had stepped inside the storage container: the streaks of blood on the metal walls, the godawful stench - and he shuddered.

  “You know how he killed them?”

  Garth tensed. Shook his head.

  “Severed the carotid artery. Let them bleed out, sliced them down the middle and pulled out the entrails.” He locked eyes with Garth. “That sound at all familiar to you?”

  Garth’s stomach churned. The cigarette tasted harsh on his lips. His mouth was dry, his throat burning. This, he promised himself, was the last time he would ever smoke. “Look, I don’t know what this is all about, but I didn’t know the guy, I swear.”

  The car fell silent. Garth dropped his cigarette out of the window.

  “Do you prong,” the detective said, “or do you stick?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “On the kill floor. Do you prong or stick?”

  “Oh. Well, we take turns, but… stick, mostly.”

  “Yeah. See, that’s how it works - a two man job. Rarely does one man do both. There’s a psychological reason for it, see. The first man, well, he’s just anesthetizing a live animal. The second man is bleeding an already lifeless creature. That way, you have a kill floor where no killing actually takes place. Two men, one dead animal, no moral responsibility. Isn’t that incredible?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “I find that incredible. But that’s the key to it, see - always have the other guy there to share the load.”

  Garth blinked. He waited a moment to check that Keith had finished. Thought maybe he’d missed a punchline. “Well, thanks for the smoke.”

  Keith started the engine. “Yeah, I’d better be getting back.”

  Garth hopped out of the vehicle, glad to be free, inhaling a lungful of fresh night air.

  Keith leaned over, a business card in his outstretched hand. “My number,” he said. “Just in case.”

  Garth took the card and closed the door. It was a rather dog-eared c
ard, but that seemed fitting. He watched as Keith drove away.

  He shook his head. This was turning into one surreal week. Returning to the house, he fished for his key and poked it in the lock. As he stepped inside and turned, closing the door, he saw something out of the corner of his eye.

  A figure. Some distance along the street.

  His body went rigid. What he had seen was a heavy-set man, and he was standing, motionless, watching the house.

  Garth wrenched the door back open, his heart bashing against his rib cage, and peered down the street.

  The figure was gone.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  Please, not today, Garth thought, as he pulled up to the factory gates and a swarm of protesters surrounded his car. There were always a lot more of them on the day shift, but their understanding of the rules regarding apostrophe use was no more advanced than that of their night time counterparts. Boycott Wortham Meat’s, read one sign. Animal’s have right’s too, proclaimed another.

  “Mur-der-rah!” they shouted in unison. “Mur-der-rah! Mur-der-rah!”

  Another virtually sleepless night (except for the nightmare, of course, and if he concentrated really hard he could still hear the moaning) had made him sensitive to almost all external stimuli; bright lights and loud sounds particularly. How on earth he was going to get through his shift, he had no idea.

  “Mur-der-rah! Mur-der-rah!”

  He eased forward on the gas. The demonstrators parted before him. Passing through the throng, he mouthed their chant back to them while ironically pumping his fist in the air. Mur-der-rah! Mur-der-rah!

  At that moment there was a thunderous crash, and Garth jumped, his ears ringing. He turned in time to witness a burly young man smacking the side of his car with a placard.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Garth growled. He leapt from the vehicle before his brain had fully engaged, charging up to the protester even as a voice inside his head tried to talk him down from this course of action. He threw the guy up against a blood-red Meat is Murder banner and grabbed him by the collar of his dirty green parka.

  The chanting ceased.

  “You want a piece of me?” Garth screamed in the guy’s face. “Or you wanna pay for the damage? Huh? Your choice.”

  The guy looked upon him with wide-eyed terror. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and offered it to him.

  Garth stared at the wallet and suddenly came to his senses, clocking the fear etched across the man’s face. He eased off, straightening his collar. “I’m not trying to mug you, dude. Just, you know…that was not cool.”

  He climbed back into the car, his hands shaking as they gripped the steering wheel. He waved to Felix on the gate and entered the premises. What the hell is wrong with me? he thought.

  Once inside the factory, he checked the roster and saw that Boyd had changed his duties once again. Fuming, he nonetheless kept himself in check, making his way to his new post. It was going to be one of those days, he realized, and he was in precisely the wrong mindset to deal with it.

  He was now on the scalding tank, a job that was unpleasant and repetitive even by abattoir standards. It was a brain-numbing task that required zero skill and less than five minutes of training, and as a result was usually given to the new guy or the work experience chump or to Nathan, the pleasant but simple-minded chap the factory had employed in order to fill some kind of quota.

  The job involved dropping hogs that had already bled out into a vat of scalding water in order to remove their body hair. After twenty minutes of button-pressing tedium, one of the animals regained consciousness in the water, screaming and squealing as it fought to stay alive. Its noises sawed through Garth’s head. He just wanted it to be over. He pressed another button and watched as the rotating arm of the tank came around and pushed the hog back under, ensuring that it had no chance of survival.

  Mur-der-rah! he chanted in his head, an ironic smile surfacing on his lips. Mur-der-rah! Mur-der-rah!

  The smile fell from his face as he looked up and saw someone watching him from the other side of the factory floor.

  Everything slowed to a stop. Sounds became distant, muffled.

  That someone was Eddie Serling.

  The shock hit like a hammer blow, forcing all of the air out of his lungs. His stomach cramped, his eyes bulged from their sockets, his mind spun. He grabbed hold of a safety rail for support but failed to save himself, dropping to his knees.

  Eddie was only looking vaguely in his direction, Garth realized. He wasn’t staring. His eyes had clouded over too much for that. He cut a pathetic figure, shrunken in stature and rounded of shoulders, with a sideways gait like a broken puppet. The cleansing may not have dispensed with Eddie Serling the way Garth had intended, but it had certainly taken its toll on him.

  Garth stepped down from the tank, his eyes never leaving the ghost as he crossed the factory floor. Quite what he intended to do when he reached him, he had no idea.

  Father Padraig’s ritual had succeeded in banishing Eddie from Eldham Road, of that Garth was sure. But instead of packing him off to an afterlife, it seemed to have given him the gift of freedom. The freedom to now go wherever he pleased.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Boyd cried out, marching over to him. “Who said you could leave your post? Get back up there!”

  “I’m not a pig in a pen,” Garth retorted. He couldn’t tolerate Boyd’s dictatorial ways, not today. He looked around for Eddie’s ghost, but couldn’t see him. He continued on. Boyd grabbed his arm.

  Garth shrugged him off. “Don’t touch me!”

  “What’s the matter?” Boyd said, grinning. “Missing your boyfriend?”

  Garth stopped in his tracks and turned to him. “What did you say?”

  He noticed that all the workers within earshot had stopped what they’d been doing and were watching intently. He felt a wave of shame ripple through him. This was schoolboy stuff, and he refused to lower himself to Boyd’s level. He’d heard through the factory grapevine that Boyd, who was almost fifty, had still lived with his mother until recently, when she passed away. Now he lived alone in her house. He’d never married, presumably because no woman could ever put up with him.

  Garth dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Whatever.”

  “Shame he couldn’t drive,” Boyd said. “That was a really nice car he wrecked.”

  Don’t do it, Garth’s inner voice begged. Don’t give him what he wants. But it was too late. He already found himself within an inch of Boyd’s face. “You want to repeat that?”

  “Oh, go on,” Boyd said. “Hit me, please. I’m gagging for a reason to fire your useless arse.”

  Garth took a deep breath and assessed the situation. As much as he wanted to knock his lights out, this smug twerp wasn’t worth losing his job over. He backed down and turned away.

  Boyd smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Can’t even do that.”

  Garth caught the eye of a colleague, who chuckled. As he looked around, his fellow workers were all highly amused.

  You know what, his inner voice said, maybe it will be worth it, after all.

  He spun around and delivered a right hook that connected satisfyingly with Boyd’s fat head.

  ***

  Garth dropped his uniform into the dirty laundry and showered, rinsing away the blood and stench of the place one final time. He crossed the parking lot to his car, awash with an odd feeling of euphoria. A tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He even giggled as he climbed into his car. Quite what he would tell Wendy, and what he would do with the rest of his life - these were concerns for another time. He dialed up the volume of the radio and rocked out to AC/DC as he waved to Felix on the gate. He blew kisses to the protesters as he passed them. Their chants were inaudible.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  He woke with the feeling that he was being watched, and a shudder twisted down his spine. He wanted nothing more than to creep under the cove
rs and lay there in denial, but after a moment of psyching himself up, he lifted his head from the pillow. He almost expected him to be there in the dark, inches from his face, the foul odor of the dead wafting from his mouth of rotting teeth. Or maybe he was propped up in the doorway. He imagined him there, silhouetted by the shaft of hazy moonlight from the landing window.

  Garth climbed out of bed, careful not to disturb Wendy, and went downstairs. He pulled aside one of the living room curtains and there he was, across the street, staring back at him, and although Garth jolted at the sight of the ghost, his presence was not a shock. This was the way of things now. Garth had played his hand, but instead of folding as expected, the Chalkstone Ripper had raised the stakes. Now Garth wanted out of this game before he lost everything.

  He rummaged through the dirty laundry for some clothes and threw them on, every part of him trembling, like an adolescent preparing to confront the school bully. He exited onto the street, his breath billowing before him, his brain seizing up with terror as he saw the figure across the road. His feet carried him onward anyway.

  Eddie was falling apart. His cloudy, sunken eyes gazed in Garth’s general direction but never locked onto him, as if he was blind. The skin of his face had burst and cracked open in several places.

  “Let’s do this,” Garth said. “Right now. I”m not going to run in fear from you, and I absolutely will not allow you to harm my family. So let’s end this.”

  Eddie stood there, unmoving, his shoulders slumped forward. Something fell from his mouth and hit the pavement with a tiny clink. Garth thought it might have been a tooth.